IBM Watson from Jeopardy! to Healthcare

Could a quiz-show winning computer advise your doctor?

Abstract."Chronic kidney disease for $500 please!" Although medical providers are
unlikely to utter these words as they search for appropriate medical
information and clinical guidelines to diagnose and manage patients, they
may soon have an advanced computer system reading their notes and listening
to their conversations with patients. Could IBM's automatic
question-answering system Watson, which decisively bested the two greatest
champions in the quiz show Jeopardy!, be reconfigured to gather evidence for
professionals providing your health care? Could it answer questions about
the latest medical knowledge, dig up hidden but crucial facts from your
health record, and even help diagnose diseases that may have gone
unrecognized? Challenges abound, from capturing the much deeper and
subtler reasoning that medical reasoning demands, to identifying gaps of
information in a patient's records, and ultimately to transform Watson from
a system which competed against people on a quiz show to one which can
interactively work with them to better care for your health.

Dr. David Gondek leads the Knowledge
Capture and Learning and Medical Adaptation groups for the Watson project, which develop and apply artificial intelligence techniques
including natural language processing, machine learning, and knowledge representation and reasoning for the Watson question answering system,
focusing on the tasks of analyzing questions, weighing evidence, and evaluating confidence in hypotheses. He was the lead for machine
learning and game strategy on the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge to build a computer system capable of winning at the quiz show, Jeopardy!, and is
currently working on extending Watson to help support evidence-based decision making in medicine. Dr. Gondek received his B.A. in Mathematics
and Computer Science at Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University.

Dr. Gondek's lecture is part of the celebrations of the centenary of Alan Turing (1912-1954) and is sponsored by the programme Public
Understanding of Artificial Intelligence (PUAI) of the AISB. Dr. Gondek will also give a talk at the
event TiC@Kings taking place at King's College on Saturday, 18 February 2012, and Sunday, 19 February 2012.